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The Great Gatsby Videos 16 videos

The Great Gatsby Part 1: Course Introduction
30238 Views

It's the roaring 20s. A time of wealth, partying, and a huge inequality gap. Fun, fun, and, uh...not-so-fun. Hit play to discover more about the se...

The Great Gatsby Part 2: Glittering Eggs
43679 Views

East Egg: East coast, old money, and ponies. Maybe unicorns. Those snotty East Eggers won’t tell us anything. West Egg: West coast, new money, an...

The Great Gatsby Part 6: Eternal Graceless Circles
58414 Views

Gatsby’s a man who throws huge parties and still has zero friends. Maybe they’re all like...Tupperware parties or something. Check out the vide...

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The Great Gatsby Part 1: Course Introduction 30238 Views


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Description:

It's the roaring 20s. A time of wealth, partying, and a huge inequality gap. Fun, fun, and, uh...not-so-fun. Hit play to discover more about the setting of The Great Gatsby.


Transcript

00:01

We speak student!

00:05

The Great Gatsby

00:07

Introduction

00:09

a la Shmoop

00:12

Okay, welcome to Gatsby a la Shmoop,

00:15

the video version.

00:16

We're talking here with Dr. Deb.

00:18

Gatsby. Great novel. Mediocre movies

00:22

throughout history.

00:23

So, Deb, let's frame things in the time frame

00:27

that Gatsby was written in and takes place in.

00:31

What was that era like?

00:32

Talk to us about what a day in the life was for a typical person

00:36

- in the 20s. - Sure.

00:37

It was called "The Roaring Twenties" for a reason.

00:39

It was roaring.

00:41

[ meow ]

00:43

So World War I had just ended.

00:45

And the Roaring Twenties was a period of great wealth.

00:50

The stock market was booming.

00:52

And we kind of think of it as

00:55

a time of luxury and wealth

00:58

and women in flapper dresses and stuff like that.

01:01

- And -- - What's a flapper dress?

01:03

Like what flaps?

01:04

- The skirt. - The skirt?

01:05

- Yeah. - Okay.

01:07

But what Fitzgerald is trying to show us

01:10

through The Great Gatsby and his other works

01:12

is that it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows,

01:15

and that underneath the facade of luxury and wealth

01:20

was this kind of emptiness.

01:23

How did inequality affect people during this time?

01:27

So what you're talking about is this idea that

01:30

the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, right?

01:32

So it just -- The disparity between the classes is growing.

01:37

Fitzgerald is in an interesting place because he grew up

01:40

in I guess you could say a middle-class family.

01:44

His parents weren't super wealthy, but

01:46

his mom had had an inherit, so they were fine.

01:49

They were well enough off.

01:51

But Fitzgerald himself never really felt --

01:54

He felt like an outsider.

01:56

He hadn't quite reached that level of wealth.

01:59

You know, the American dream.

02:00

And that's where we see Nick Carraway

02:03

from the beginning, our narrator

02:06

in The Great Gatsby.

02:07

That's kind of where he sits, too.

02:09

And in The Great Gatsby, we see this

02:13

excess of wealth, but then we're also exposed

02:16

to the opposite, to the Valley of Ashes between

02:20

the Eggs and the city, which you'll be introduced to very soon,

02:22

where Wilson lives and he's a mechanic.

02:27

So we kind of see this

02:29

huge distance between someone like Gatsby

02:32

and someone like Wilson.

02:34

- And that's how that's presented in The Great Gatsby. - Got it.

02:39

[ whoop ]

02:40

What was life like during the 1920s?

02:43

How did inequality affect people during this time?

02:49

[ woo! ]

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